Eric Reasons

Bo Peabody has a nice piece in the WaPo about the business models of Social Networks. He's a bit more dour about their monetization schemes than I would venture, but generally is in the ballpark. A visit from the pope may attract a large audience, but it's not a great place to make money. Likewise, social networks can successfully bring people together, but don't expect them to turn a profit Peabody cites examples of the failure of both advertising models on social networks, and the inability of social networks to get subscribers to pay for their services. Peabody cites the experience of Tripod (a once moderately sized social network which Peabody created), and reveals that the ad revenue generated on the site was never a fraction of a percent of that which Google hauls in with targeted search ads. This is not necessarily a failure of a social networking ad model, but a failure of the size and intelligence of the social network. I imagine that Facebook's targeted ads, ...

I can see the potential benefits of using SideWiki. As Clay Shirky said, "Every webpage is a latent community". As far as robbing bloggers of their comment space, Google Notes can do that. Facebook does that. FriendFeed does it, etc. It's not new, and I'm not sure that it's evil. Moving power to the edge isn't just about moving it to the authorspace, be it the New York Times, or BuzzMachine. In my case, it's about moving the power to me as a commenter. And I'm just as much on the edge as the Author. If nobody whips up a integrated comment system for WordPress and Blogger that uses SideWiki as the engine, I'll be surprised. A quick search through the API looks like there's no way to use the API to insert comments yet, which could be a roadblock. And the fact that comments are voted up instead of threaded pretty much kills it as a discussion space. However, I'm cautiously excited about what this may evolve into. in reference to: Google Sidewi...

I was excited to get home and listen to Julian Genachowski's speech on the FCC's stance on Net Neutrality yesterday. If you haven't read it yet, you can find it here. I was, and remain, cautiously optimistic about Genachowski's appointment, and President Obama's professed support of Net Neutrality. But as always, the Devil is in the details. Sadly, Genachowski's speech did little to share those details with us. This seems to be Julian Sanchez's observation as well, though he's far more skeptical than I: The digest version is that the open Internet is awesome (true!) and so the FCC is going to impose a “nondiscrimination” obligation on telecom providers—though Genachowski makes sure to stress this won’t be an obstacle to letting the copyright cops sniff through your packets for potentially “unauthorized” music, or otherwise interfere with “reasonable” network management practices. If the FCC's stance amounts to protecting end-to-end best effort deliv...